American Prometheus

It is no surprise this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Particularly compelling is how, through a deeply personal and beautifully crafted story of a complex life and mind, it offers profound insight into the uneasy relationship among politics, science, war, and morality.

Oppenheimer, one of the greatest and most influential physicists of the 20th century, spearheaded not only the invention of the atomic bomb but also the quantum theory that made it possible and the policies governing its use and development. A left-wing thinker and sometimes communist sympathizer in his youth, and driven throughout his life by strong humanistic impulses,… show more.

Although this book is something of a rival to my own and borrows heavily from my book—but with attribution—it is deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it received for its sympathetic portrayal of its main character.

The primary author, Marty Sherwin, was my dissertation advisor; he and I argued for many years, until his death, over the truth about Oppenheimer. Although I yield to no one in my response and admiration for Marty, my book is right.  

A book that combines the intellectual firepower of possibly the best nuclear historian (Martin Sherwin) and biographer (Kai Bird) of their generation to produce something that is much more than the story of the “father of the nuclear bomb.”

As amazing as the film is, the book is a real thing of beauty. Juxtaposed with Ellsberg’s writings, what the book shows is just how much the architects of the nuclear era struggled with the moral implications of this reality.

In 1945 J. Robert Oppenheimer was lionized as a brilliant scientist and a courageous American patriot, for his direction of the Manhattan Project. And yet, just a scant nine years later, he was a political and cultural pariah, stripped of his security clearance and subjected to a humiliating, public fall from grace.

This extraordinary transformation in his stature had little to do with Oppenheimer, who remained much the same person over the course of these nine years. What changed was the historical context, which could not have been more different in 1945 than it was in 1954.

This is a… show more.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant and fascinating personality. This biography is one of the finest, most complete, and most interesting biographies that you will ever read, and its subject matter is something we all need to know more about – the atomic age, national security, the FBI, and fear of Communism.

Its topic is fascinating, the research is extremely deep and complete, and the analysis is balanced and convincing. We all need to know more about the birth of the atomic age and the politics surrounding it.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer was an incredible feat of writing.

Bird and Sherwin constructed a narrative so powerfully that it read like a novel. This is so hard to do when tackling such an iconic life as Oppenheimer’s. From the very beginning we are introduced to this “wonder-kid” who speaks multiple languages and is quite simply a genius, awkward, out of sorts, bullied… and who eventually not only finds a path forward but actually hacks the path single-handedly into the atomic future and his own mythmaking status.

And that is the fundamental pleasure of… show more.

As a film scholar and Christopher Nolan fan, I was very excited about the prospect of seeing Oppenheimer, and I prepared myself by reading many books on nuclear matters, including this biography of the so-called ‘father of the atomic bomb,’ which the movie is based on.

Having been obsessed with (reading about) the threat of nuclear war ever since my childhood in West Germany in the 1960s and 70s, I had high expectations, and the book did not disappoint (nor did the movie). There is so much to learn here about this odd genius and the history of modern… show more.

This is a meticulously researched book, a deserving Pulitzer Prize winner; Christopher Nolan consulted it for his movie Oppenheimer due out this summer.

Shirley met Marty Sherwin in Washington D.C. in the fall of 2006 when she was beginning the research on what would become our book. Marty was beginning to pack up the files on Prometheus to give to the Library of Congress. He invited both Patricia and Shirley to his home and made a place for them to work at his dining room table.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the scientist who led the effort to create the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was a complicated character, a fine physicist but an even better leader with the perfect temperament to lead a group of scientists with giant egos and even more giant intellects to create the world’s first atomic bombs. Bird and Sherwin tell that story extremely well, and also the subsequent tragic story of his fall from grace during the McCarthy era. 

“Father of the atomic bomb” is not the legacy anyone might wish for oneself. Yet that was the plight of Oppenheimer, a leading theoretical physicist in the 1940s. The authors spotlight the harnessing of the “awesome power of the sun” and how heroic he was for his country in a time of war. But then there’s post-Hiroshima Oppenheimer, confronting the consequences of what he had done. He proposed international cooperation over the controls of atomic materials. He thus paved a path for keeping the world safe. In doing so, he made powerful enemies, like the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who… show more.